Learning Object Economies; Barriers and Drivers | 18/02/2004

The massive development required to achieve the goals of governments and educators - support for lifelong learning; enough variety to allow anyone to choose material that suits their learning style; comprehensive access to all subjects domains to eliminate the need for proximity to dedicated teachers - requires the reuse and sharing of educational resources.

Reuse and sharing of learning objects is held by some to be difficult (e.g. Downes, 2003 states that “learning design and reusability are incompatible”) and by others to be the only sustainable route (e.g. Littlejohn, 2003). This paper examines the barriers to reuse and sharing of learning objects with historical evidence based on projects such as the Education Object Economy (EOE) and the Scottish Electronic Staff Development Library (Campbell et al, 2001) to identify the barriers and drivers that impede or encourage progress towards learning object economies.

Learning object economies are marketplaces for the sharing and reuse of learning objects. The currency of these marketplaces may or may not be cash, but normal market economics is only one of many factors influencing the learning object economies. Other factors are personal - willingness to share, ownership, copyright, accessibility, incentive; technical - interoperability, granularity, configurability; societal - kudos, not-invented-here, cost-benefit; international - language, culture; pedagogical - context v neutrality, activity v content.

This paper examines trends in these barriers and drivers and concludes that, while problems still have to be overcome, learning object economies are closer to a thriving reality now than ever before. The paper concludes by examining the community aspects of learning object economies to identify the scale and membership issues that will produce learning object economies with greater or lesser success.

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